Coursera's Huge Online Classes Roar Into Brazil, India and China

George Anders
, ContributorOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

One million students have signed up for college-level classes being offered online by California-based Coursera -- and most of them aren't in the United States. A newly released list of Coursera's geographic reach shows that non-U.S. signups account for 61.5% of Coursera's enrollment, with Brazil, India and China leading the way.

Coursera uses the Internet to teach 117 courses, covering everything from calculus to finance, world history and Greek mythology. Its faculty consists of professors from more than a dozen leading universities in the U.S., Canada and Britain -- including Duke, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Edinburgh. Students sign up free of charge. While Coursera doesn't yet offer formal academic credit or traditional degrees, such credentials could be part of its expansion plans in years to come.

Although Coursera has been in business only since April, its enrollment register now includes students from all 196 generally recognized countries in the world. The company's top 20 list includes leading Continental European countries such as Russia, Germany and Spain, as well as major English-language nations around the globe, including Canada, Britain and Australia. But there are surprises on the leaderboard, too, including Colombia, Ukraine and Thailand.

Coursera also appears to be making rapid progress in fostering real-world connections within specific metro areas worldwide where students are clustered. On its website, Coursera now lists local student communities in 433 cities, all aiming to create periodic meetups so participants can mingle.

The three largest such groups are in the United States, with at least 90 students apiece in Stanford, San Francisco and New York. But the rest of the top-1o list includes Bangalore, London, Moscow, Sao Paolo and Mumbai.

Not everyone who signs up for one of Coursera's massive open online classes (MOOCs) makes it to the finish line. Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer science professor who is a Coursera co-founder, estimated in a June interview with FORBES that one-half of enrollees complete at least one online quiz or homework assignment, and that of those, about one half finish all the coursework. So Coursera's tally of course completions might be closer to 250,000, rather than one million.

Regardless of how the numbers are sorted, professors and university administrators are intrigued by the chance to reach vast audiences around the globe, via the digital classroom. Many Coursera classes attract more than 10,000 enrollees; some can roar past 50,000.

Being able to teach a course once -- online -- and then have that version become a global standard could be enormously liberating for faculty, while also improving students' experiences, contends Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor and Coursera's other co-founder.

As Koller put it in a June interview with FORBES: "Why is it that I walk into my classroom every year, teaching this same lecture that I’ve taught for 15 years, telling the same jokes at the same time? Why shouldn't we put everything into this online format that’s actually much more engaging? That way we can use classroom time for much more meaningful interaction.”